Diemer: Santa Barbara Overture and Concertos

Ninety-six years old this year — or was it ninety-seven when this disc finally surfaced? — and Emma Lou Diemer still doesn’t get her due. Ask most concertgoers to name a woman composer who studied with Ernst Krenek at Brussels and with Roger Sessions at Eastman, who absorbed Hindemith’s contrapuntal rigor and Howard Hanson’s lyric expansiveness in the same decade, and you’ll get blank stares. She deserved better than a career mostly spent in academia at UC Santa Barbara, teaching theory to undergraduates while Copland and Bernstein got the orchestras and the headlines. This new Navona release, cobbling together tape from three different decades and three different continents, at least makes the case that somebody should have been paying closer attention.

The Santa Barbara Overture opens the disc with good cheer and not much depth. Eleven minutes of civic boosterism, essentially, written in 1996 to conjure up the town’s layered cultural history. Mission bells, mariachi inflections, pentatonic wisps that gesture vaguely toward Asia, a whiff of Native American modality. It’s the kind of piece a city commissions when it wants to hear itself flattered in sound. The Bernstein of the dance-hall scenes hovers everywhere, as does Copland at his most wide-open-prairie. None of this is a crime. It’s skillfully assembled, brightly scored, and the London Symphony under Brynmore Llewelyn Jones plays it with an unforced polish: those strings have a silvery sheen that Abbey Road’s engineers capture beautifully, brass cutting through without glare. But it’s a curtain-raiser, not a statement, and nobody should mistake it for Diemer’s real achievement.

That comes with the two concertos. Here the disc earns its keep.

The Concerto in one movement for marimba and orchestra, from 1991, is genuinely absorbing writing: knotty without being obscure, idiomatic without pandering to the instrument’s cuter tendencies (the marimba too often gets treated like a xylophone with better manners). Nathan Daughtrey brings real sinew to the solo part. His four-mallet technique stays clean through the rapid passagework, and his tone is woody and resonant rather than clattery. Joel Suben and the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra, an ensemble that has recorded miles of contemporary American repertoire for budget labels without always distinguishing itself, sound alert here, tucked in tightly behind the soloist. The textures never muddy, even when Diemer piles up cross-rhythms in the outer sections.

But the Piano Concerto is the real discovery. Twenty-seven minutes, one continuous span, and it doesn’t sag once. Betty Oberacker, who gave the premiere and for whom the piece was written, plays with an authority that’s almost proprietary. She knows exactly where the phrase wants to go, where Diemer’s harmonic language — tart and unresolved one moment, luminously tonal the next — needs a certain rhythmic elasticity to breathe. There are stretches that recall Barber’s Piano Concerto in its bravura writing, others that edge toward something more astringent, more genuinely of our moment. Vladimír Válek and the Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra respond with real sympathy; the winds in particular have character, reedy and vivid rather than merely correct.

Is it a great work? I’d stop short of that. But it’s a work that deserves champions beyond its dedicatee, and one wonders how many other American piano concertos of comparable craft sit unrecorded in some university archive, waiting for a label with Navona’s scavenging instincts.

Sound quality across sessions recorded a continent and a decade apart is remarkably consistent. The remastering job here is quietly superb, giving the Eastern European sessions a bloom and depth they probably lacked on first release. No finicky audiophile caveats needed.

Short measure, this disc — under an hour total — but at Navona’s typically modest price point that’s a quibble, not a complaint. What matters is that Diemer, dismissed by some, unfairly, as a competent regional figure, comes across here as a composer of genuine imagination who never quite got the orchestra she deserved until now. Recommended, particularly for the concertos. And overdue.